Anthropic’s Claude Autonomously Discovers New Biological System

Anthropic’s Claude Autonomously Discovers New Biological System
Anthropic announced that Claude autonomously identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA featuring CRISPR-like repeat arrays, which has been named ART.
Approximately 950 Claude agents spent 21 hours and processed 210 million tokens analyzing over 200,000 reverse transcriptases. The AI identified 3,500 candidate systems, narrowed them down to 20, and flagged ART for human review. Anthropic scientists subsequently validated the system in the company's newly established molecular biology lab.
While the exact function remains unknown, Anthropic noted that similar systems with these features are programmable and capable of executing operations such as cutting, copying, and pasting DNA. This discovery marks the first major result from the company's life sciences lab, where Claude generates biological hypotheses for human scientists to test experimentally.